Two new interesting pieces of science out this week.
Firstly was the latest piece of MMR hypothesis destroying science called ‘Absence of urinary opioid peptides in children with autism’.
MMR believers say that part of the hypothetical damage the MMR does to the gut of autistic kids is cause so-called ‘leaky gut’ syndrome, an alternative medicine hypothesis roughly suspected to be on a par with homeopathy and massaging aura’s in terms of scientific credibility.
Proponents of the autism branch of this hypothesis say that the MMR causes leaky gut and that the ‘leak’ fails to parse these urinary opioid peptides which in turn would (in effect) get the patient stoned. or to put it another way:
….these peptides result in effects which are basically opioid in nature (akin to drugs such as morphine) and that they may either, themselves, have direct opioid activity or that they may form ligands for the enzymes which would normally break down such opioid peptides that occur naturally within the Central Nervous System (CNS). In either case, the consequence would be the same. The CNS neuroregulatory role, which is normally performed by the natural opioid peptides such as the enkephalins and endorphins, would be intensified to such an extent that normal processes within the CNS would be severely disrupted…
Yeah, right.
So now some actual science (as oppose to blueskying) has looked at this. And what do they conclude:
It has been claimed for a number of years that the urine of children with autism contains exogenously derived opioid peptides. This finding is said to reflect a disturbance in the integrity of the gut epithelium, act as a diagnostic marker for autism and predict treatment response to a diet excluding gluten and casein. The aim of the present study was to determine whether exogenous or endogenous peptides were present either in the urine of children with autism, or control children.
…..
There were no significant differences between the HPLC urinary profiles of the children affected by autism and the typically developing controls. In those cases where HPLC showed peaks in the locations at which opioid peptides might be expected to be found., MALDI-TOF established that these peaks did not, in fact, represent opioid peptides at all.
……
Given the lack of evidence for any opioid peptiduria in children with autism it can neither serve as a biomedical marker for autism, nor be employed to predict or monitor response to a casein and gluten exclusion diet.
So that’s yet another nail in the undead vampire of the MMR hypothesis (in fact, is there a proper word for something which is less than a hypothesis? Even using the word ‘hypothesis’ now seems aggrandising this silliness)
On the other side of research, where actual progress is being made, an as yet unpublished study (or published but the journal issue hasn’t been released or it has and I can’t find it) has found genetic connections which they think can count towards up to 2.5% of autism:
Disruptions in the gene, called contactin 4, stop the gene from working properly and appear to stop the brain from making proper networks, the researchers reported in the Journal of Medical Genetics.
These disruptions, in which the child has either three copies of the gene or just one copy when two copies is normal, could account for up to 2.5 percent of autism cases, said Dr. Eli Hatchwell of Stony Brook University Medical Center in New York, who led the study.
Now, when we put this together with Rett, Fragile-X, Tuberous Sclerosis, de-novo mutations and a few others I can’t recall I think we’re approaching between 10 – 16% of an established genetic cause for autism(s). Slightly better than the 0% that the vaccine hypotheses are running at.
Left Brain Right Brain 
I believe that hypotheses in autism become popular if they are of the following form: “The child is normal, except for this potentially minor nuance,” like being stoned all the time.
That’s why “the child is normal, just mercury poisoned” is popular. That is even why “the child is otherwise normal, except for having bad parents” was popular once (though not with parents, obviously).
Now, when we put this together with Rett, Fragile-X, Tuberous Sclerosis, de-novo mutations and a few others I can’t recall I think we’re approaching between 10 – 16% of an established genetic cause for autism(s)
I expect Ms. Clark to chime in, as she knows more about this. I recall there’s a study that did all possible tests you could imagine in a sizable group of autistic kids. Known causes were found in more like 50% of the children. Interestingly, one of the kids was actually deaf, not autistic.
Hi Kev –
I’m not sure that a leaky gut necessitates either the MMR, or urinary peptides. There appear to be many things that can cause intestinal permiability issues, including dietary intake, bacterial or fungal overgrowth, inflammatory responses, some types of drugs, and possibly chronic stress.
Of particualr interest, I found this statement from the findings:
“In those cases where HPLC showed peaks in the locations at which opioid peptides might be expected to be found., MALDI-TOF established that these peaks did not, in fact, represent opioid peptides at all.”
I’m curious if anyone out there smarter than me might have read the entire paper and can tell us what, precisely, the HPLC peaks did (or might) represent, as opposed to opioid peptides? I guess it would also be nice to know if the HPLC peaks were found at different levels in the different groups, regardless of what they were.
Take care!
– pD
I have for some time contended that if you were to bring phial of pigs urine to a certain gentleman in Sunderland, that he would declare it to be autistic.
I think I was right all along.
Incidentally I no longer think that autism is genetic any more than catching a blue bus is. I think the whole notion of there being a rigid singular biologically definable category of autism is falling apart rapidly, and the genetics cited are another nail in that coffin.
First, I think there’s a difference between the kinds of kids in a study like Dr. G. Bradley Schaefer’s (where he found more than 40% of the kids sent to him from an autism clinic had an identifiable genetic or congenital disorder that could account for the child’s autism) and the group of kids getting labeled with “autism” out there in the real world apart from research settings.
Out there in the world where kids are getting the “autism” label, sometimes they get the label in schools where the criteria for autism is really sloppily applied and could get put on a child who had a speech/language disorder and no autism, or even a child who is not a native English speaker, or on a child with cerebral palsy if the parents or school thought that it would get the child better services. And the opposite happens too, where kids who are really on the spectrum get labeled as emotionally disturbed or something else, because the school will have to put less money into teaching the child than if he or she has an “autism” label (I’ve seen this happen here).
So, I would bet that out there in the schools there are kids who are developmentally disabled because of neglect or substance abuse by their mothers when pregnant who are called autistic, and perhaps a good number of them fit criteria for autism by anyone’s standards, but a child with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome or affects
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_alcohol_syndrome is not what we usually think of as “autistic.” My point being there are all kinds of different definitions of “autism” used in different places and it can be very politically motivated, where, for instance, white kids will get the autism label and black kids will get the “MR” label when there’s no reason to think that autism is more common in the white community than in the black community.
Anyway, back to Dr. Schaefer’s research, he thinks that if the following tests were used on kids in a sensible way:
“the following yields could conservatively be projected as
*Prometaphase chromosomes (5%)
*aCGH (10%)
*Fragile X (5%)
*MECP2 (5% females)
*PTEN (3%)
*Other (10%)”
“Other” includes things like congenital rubella syndrome, fetal valproate exposure, various metabolic problems, low cholesterol (related to Smith-Lemli-Opitz perhaps) and large problems in brain structure that can be seen on an MRI (like agenesis of the corpus collosum). aCGH is a microarray genetic test
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Array_comparative_genomic_hybridization
One study found up to 15% of females on the autism spectrum had the MECP2 gene. “Prometaphase chromosomes” would find things like large pieces of a chromosome missing or an extra chromosome as in IDIC 15.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/96448.php
http://autismdiva.blogspot.com/2005/11/autisms.html
I am certainly not a chemist. (nor a bat or rat) and not a mathemetician either, I think in shapes and colours, but I’ll tell you this, the answer to the complexities of the self assembly of the brain will be found in mathematical formulae deriving from Chaos theory, in that given a necessary number of preconditions, a certain event is inevitable.
I don’t have the proofs, but I bet by buggery they can be produced….
Now this is the wonderful thing about (Tiggers?) in that you don’t have to have a head for numbers to be able to resolve complexity if you have an alternate way of conceptualising it. I see it in n dimensional matrices. That is where autism is to be found and SBC ought to be looking to his laureates, cos I reckon Lorna Wing was there long before him with the complex modelling of autism.
This is the trouble I heard Paul Shattock some years ago set out a wonderfully logical and plausible model for autism and I did not have the right scientific background to challenge it, but somewhere in the back of my mind I thought, something is wrong, it is not like that. I am glad that the errors are now coming out by those who understand that side of things better than me.
I’ve read both articles. The second has not been published, but is an “Online First” article.
For PassionlessDrone, the article does not speculate what the High-Pressure Liquid Chromatography peaks represent. It jut reports that mass spectrometry reveals that that are not opiod peptides.
I doubt this article will make much difference to those who subscribe to gluten/cassein free diets. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t work. It matters if they perceive it as working
mayfly,
Wow! Nice William Thomas quote, and you hit the nail on the proverbial head. Indeed, “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences”. It’s quite the sociologiocal conundrum.
Ms Clark, very nice breakdown yourself. I especially found the clinical vs real world diagnosis a very valid point, and often overlooked too.
pD: “I’m not sure that a leaky gut necessitates either the MMR, or urinary peptides.”
Or autism, for that matter.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/97v70800264521r3/
I know my son certainly doesn’t seem ‘stoned all the time.’ I think it’s quite the opposite, actually.
And what schools are SUPPOSED to do here in the states, (not what they necessarily do), is provide services based on what is the least restrictive environment conducive to the child learning. IE. they ARE NOT supposed to provide services based on a diagnosis. However, they do. (While the ‘least restrictive’ rules are intended to prevent discrimination while at the same time saving the schools a little money, this rule may or may not screw my son over, in that his autism diagnosis no longer guarantees him summer school, so I have to make sure the IEP is written carefully, esp since the former director of his program moved to another district – she was definitely a proponent of making sure the IEP is written properly, and knew how to write it properly)